Alpha Prime is basically an extended tech demo, clocking in at 5 hours of playtime. And oh boy, does it show.

Let me get out the good parts first. As far as tech demos go, it looks pretty, with loads of cool effects on many interiors (outside doesn't look that good), and runs very nicely on my crappy laptop at 1280x800 resolution, except when there's too many particles (my NVidia G105M HATES them), you probably will run this perfectly. Also, ALL cutscenes are in-game, which is definitely a plus for both disk space and cutscene quality (seriously, ♥♥♥♥ those pre-rendered cutscenes).
...and that's all the good points.

As for the bad points, well... everything else.
The story is not just completely forgettable, it's also accompanied by hilariously bad writing and voice acting. I'll sum it up nicely for you: Miner has to find artifact on Mars-like planet because of ♥♥♥♥♥ ex-girlfriend, shoot many things because CORPORATIONS ARE EVIL (also evil robots for no good reason), ♥♥♥♥♥♥ boss fight for the artifact, dead because your ♥♥♥♥♥ was a ♥♥♥♥♥ all along. Seriously. I did not give a single ♥♥♥♥ about the story, except for the hilarious parts, my favorite being Paolo, the Italian with incredibly bad engrish, getting shot in the leg and saying "No! Paolo go nowhere! Paolo is a cripple! Disability pension!". Too bad the game kills him WAY too early, clearly he should've been the protagonist instead.

Oh yes, the gameplay. Enemies have perfect accuracy and INSTANT reactions, which makes even Easy a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ nightmare. Enjoy sniper shotgunners and exploiting their line-of-sight by leaning or crouching behind things so you become completely invisible to them.
Literally none of the weapons are either balanced or enjoyable, and ALL of them have ♥♥♥♥♥♥ damage. The first weapon is a useless hammer, you can attack as fast as you can press the mouse button but you gotta be WAY too close, not to mention every single enemy has a ranged weapon anyway, so good luck not dying. The pistol shoots too damn slow and feels underpowered. The shotgun is one of the worst i've seen in any game, you have to be almost as close as the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hammer to do any decent damage (or any damage! Enjoy missing every shot while emptying all 8 shells!). The gatling rifle is the best one, which isn't saying much because it does ♥♥♥♥♥♥ damage and low ammo per clip. The sniper rifle would've been the best gun, had they not ♥♥♥♥ed up the zoom mode so badly that everytime you try to aim it's a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ chore and you'll miss many shots because of it. Both the rocket launcher and grenades are hilariously bad because you need sniper-like accuracy for it to do any decent damage, because the splash radius is just TINY. And finally the Flamethrower... the worst weapon in the game, yes, even worse than the hammer, you have to be almost as close to anything despite the flame going at least twice the distance for it to do any damage, and what it DOES damage is absolutely pathetic, a mosquito would deal more damage than this.

What else? The movement is hilariously broken, especially the jumping. They let you do a floaty jump but if you fall more than 5 meters you're pretty much dead. As for landing the jump itself, it seems to slide off things until it finds the flattest surface possible, it's really weird and it causes weirder deaths because of it. Because stairs are treated like ♥♥♥♥♥♥ ramps, I jumped downstairs and INSTANTLY DIED. And don't try to stand still either, because you'll slowly slide down that ♥♥♥♥ like's it's covered in butter. Also beware for anything with physics, it might just kill you, the most hilarious one is getting yourself killed by your own basketball. ON THE GROUND. JUST BECAUSE IT MOVED TOWARDS YOU. And finally, all the models barely look better than the ones on Doom 3, which is clearly what they were trying to mimic (some of them look just as ♥♥♥♥♥♥, too).

Bottom line, just... don't bother. Only reason I even got this was because of a bundle. Spare yourself the torture.

EDIT: Steam keeps putting this game on sale (I already regret making this funny), and I'd like to point out a few other things about the game, so here we go.

This game has a lot of stuff that's so underused and generically/badly thought out, you can seriously tell this was a tech demo from the start and didn't actually evolve past that, they just made it longer.

You get a hacking device early on in the game that lets you open locked doors and help you out in combat by making certain objects blow up... except sooner than you'd think, you'll never use it again unless you absolutely need to open a door. Zero combat use after a certain point.

Yes, you can hack one of those silly remote-controlled box lifters at least twice during the game. Oh boy, just what I was missing from my favorite FPS game, ♥♥♥♥♥♥ box puzzles! Good thing I'll never see them again.

Did I mention slow-motion? If you've paid any remote attention to the story, you know that stuff's Hubbardium, which is, you know... the very same reason that made everyone on the planet INSANE? And screw you if you think you deserve a good explanation for that (even in the end, it still doesn't make enough sense), so start pumping that ♥♥♥♥ into your veins and enjoy the orange effect.

And finally, yes indeed, you do get to drive a vehicle in one of the final parts of the game, with decent physics to boot (as far as martian-like physics go anyway). But once more, it was badly thought out to the point that you'll only get a brief section of it and never see it again. Come on, split that stuff out evenly.

Oh, and since people want to know the fun parts of the game, here's my list of screenshots, containing most of the amusing parts in the game. Enjoy.

Some of Paolo's lines:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=217532116
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=217532203
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=217532274

Amusing moments:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=217970931
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=217971762
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=217982166
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=217982489
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=218005034
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=218036842

Odd stuff caused by bugs:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=217964657
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=217554737
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=217972941
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=218003610

Bloody hell, this is the most complete review I've ever written now, Hope it was worth your time.

This game is bad. but could be so bad it's funny kind of bad.
Cheesy emotionless voiceacting,
graphics are meh.
And i just died from getting hit with a basketball.
No seriously i found a basketball court, tried to score, ball hit the wall and flew back at me, and the ball did more damage then the pistols,shotguns and machineguns.
And theres no checkpoints so SAVE for goodness sake.

But it did make me laugh,
you can pick up anything and throw it around,
the dialogue is pretty riffable.
And you can spam the melee weapon and end up hitting things faster then a machinegun which is pretty funny

If you like sci-fi cheese, and making fun of bad games this is for you.

Got killed by a basketball 10/10

Alpha Prime is a terrible game, and I kind of like it that way.

It's chock full of awful encounters, you fight the same three enemies the entire game, half the guns are useless and the other half only slightly less so, and levels seem to stretch on endlessly as they blur together. "Balance? To hell with that" you can hear Black Element yell as a barely discernible enemy on the other side of the room head shots you with a shotgun. Elements from other games are unglamorously fitted into parts of the game, like a patchwork quilt of design that's been out of style for years and manages to be significantly worse still than what they were lifted from.

There do not currently exist words in the English language strong enough to properly describe the true horror that is Alpha Prime's writing, such an elongated mess of horrendous characters, dialogue unfit for a B movie, plot lines thrown out and then just left there, and a bit of casual misogyny thrown in just for flavor. It's agonizing to listen to, stilted voice acting keeping it from even being somewhat amusing, and there is so, so much of it.

Alpha Prime is bad; a masterwork of mediocrity at the best of times. But again...I kind of liked it, maybe because for as miserable as it most certainly is, it's strangely polished in ways that made it kind of endearing if only ever so slightly. It feels like a game that might have been an obscure hit a decade ago, and I guess part of me still enjoys the sort of game that is so unmistakably rubbish, but its developer still clearly put a ton of effort into making it so I'm willing to go along for the ride even as I ask myself what is wrong with me. It's not broken, well, mostly. It's just bland, tedious, uninspired and a posterchild for dreadful videogame writing (though I will definitely be using "total lamers" as an insult).

Can I recommend it? Probably not. Would I play it again? Not on your life! Do I regret playing it? I wouldn't say so.

A straightforward shooter with pretensions of a story. The enemies don't seem to be able to miss, making harder difficulties frustrating. There are a few mini-puzzles and the odd driving bit along the way. Not bad for a couple of quid, but not worth anything more.

I actually liked this one a lot, though I played on Easy after reading about the uneven difficulty.

Enjoyed the gameplay, the story, the characters. More than worth the $1 I paid for it, and now it's on sale for half that!

Be aware that there's a LOOOONG unskippable cutscene at the beginning.

Edit: I've been told that the cutscene is, in-fact, skippable. Either my memory fails me in this, or this has been patched in after I played it (not going to bother re-installing to make sure.)

I have nearly 500 games in my Steam account, and the vast majority of them are still unplayed. So now I'm dedicating an hour to each of these games and writing a series of One Hour Reviews.

One Hour Reviews - Game 6
Alpha Prime
Purchase Date: 1/16/2014

Alpha Prime is another game I picked up thanks to a Humble Bundle. 18 months later I am finally getting to check it out. Turns out I could have waited.

Alpha Prime starts out much like one of those B-movies you expect to see on the Sci-Fi channel, with a bit of a cheesy story and some bad acting. After listing to a laughably bad impression of a drunk guy, I meet my ex-girlfriend and get an exposition dump to explain the start of the game. So about the first 10 minutes of my hour long review is spent in the opening cutscenes.

Eventually though I end up on a planet and find myself in trouble in no time. I quickly discover this game has all of the hallmarks of a standard shooter. It starts me with a crappy melee weapon and slowly but surely I find better weapons to upgrade to. And it's all the weapons you'd expect to see from pistols, to shotguns, to assault rifles and grenades.

Along with some rather bad acting and dialogue, everytime I would pick up a weapon, the game would tell me "Picked Pistol". Not picked up. I started to feel like I was playing Pokemon. Pistol, I choose you! Shotgun, I choose you!

The enemy AI seemed pretty dumb, although they were all good shots, so it still added some difficulty to the combat. You definitely want to quick save the game often, as you will be reloading a lot. But not necessarily because you died in combat. Once I had to reload because the entire game crashed. Another time I was crawling through an airduct (another hallmark of a first person shooter), and I somehow managed to crawl through a fan without the game registering a collision. So I kept crawling through the airduct but then I ran out of level, and fell out of the world. Some games when you fall out of the world it will 'reset' you to a nearby save spot. This game just kills you dead.

The game lets you interact with items in the game, although most of the time it serves no purpose. There was one time I had to drop a sheet of aluminum over a hole in the floor to run across it. A few times I opened up air ducts or lockers. But a lot of objects were just randomly lying around like books or boxes.

My favorite though was the random basketball I ran across. Not only that but I found it in a room with a basketball hoop. I wasted several minutes trying in vain to make a shot. It's hard to actually throw items in the game. All you can do is drop things, but if you happen to be moving your mouse as you drop it, you can kind of 'fling' things around. In the end, all I succeeded in doing was get the basketball stuck in mid air. I even tried shooting it down with my assault rifle, but it wasn't going anywhere.

Between the crash, the glitches, and the bad dialog, you're probably thinking this isn't a very good game, and you'd be right. The only charm it has is in that B-movie vibe you get from the story, but even then it's pretty cheesy and there are some gaps in logic that make it hard to ignore.

Like Pablo. Pablo is a character you meet, who is kind of charming with his broken English. He gets shot during a cutscene and goes on about his shot leg and how he can't go with you. Then the cut scene ends, and there is Pablo standing up on both legs, watching as I leave. Meanwhile, 5 feet away is a med station. I guess the med stations don't work on bulletholes in legs or something.

It's not so much that I dislike Alpha Prime, but there's really just nothing particularly redeeming about it. There are simply much better games out there to spend your time on.

Overall Recommendation: Pass

If you want torture, buy it!

Graphics are ok.
About 5 hours long
AI is unbalanced. You WILL die a lot! I swear they have accuracy in the high 80s
Weapons suck. Too many close range weapons and the long range weapons you'll run out of ammo quickly
Story is forgetable
Unstable framerate when you die and reload your save. Ran around 250-300fps. Dropped to <20 after reload. Takes time to stablalize
It's $5

PROs:
-You can kill yourself with a basketball while doing a slam dunk.

CONs:
-You can't carry a boombox through the whole game.
-You can't carry funny knee-wounded italian through the whole game.

This game takes away all of the good things from you, but i highly recommend it if you want to kill yourself with a basketball while doing a slam dunk.

This game suprised me.Gameplay is solid ,good and pretty chalenging .Very bad chessy voiceacting,storyline(which is not bad thing for me)
Buy it now if you grew up on old fps games

As someone who grew up playing and loving a lot of FPS its been actually a long time since i have played one, let alone one with mouse and kb. Alpha Prime is a game that reminds me of the fun of i had with those games, but also more of reminder of just how far game dev. has come in such a short time. AP was released in 2007 alongside the likes of the first Uncharted, MW4, Crysis, Halo 3 to name just a few. Thats tough company to be a part of and why AP is forgettable. But while AP is just another Half-Life inspired shooter with horrible voice acting, terrible writing, and story the action is pretty intense, the level design and setting is strong and the game on normal setting was very challenging. If you are looking to scratch that nostalgic FPS itch Alpha Prime is not a bad choice.

The Good
Setting,levels and pacing
Leaning and being patient is vital for survival
Intense firefights
No shield, No regenerating health, no auto aim
AI is smart and always moving

The Bad
Horrible voice acting, writing, story
Useless weapons(hammer, grenades, flamethrower) and bulletime
Why do i pick up horbarrdium, and vials scattered throughout lockers and levels are not used?
AI is a little too perfect in aiming